Leni Riefenstahl, the German film-maker who gained notoriety for her beautifully shot documentaries extolling the aesthetic virtues of Nazism, died at home in Bavaria on Monday at the age of 101.

"Hardly any artist in the last century was as controversial as Riefenstahl," said Hanns-Georg Rodek in Die Welt. "Her last 50 years were one constant attempt to take the pen from the hand of history and write her own obituary. Now she is dead."

Her most famous film, Triumph of the Will, documented Hitler's 1934 Nuremberg rally. It "created an image of the Nazi phenomenon which remains with us today", said Val Williams in the Independent. "With its awesome combination of ritual, piety, hysteria and order, [it] marked a watershed in German history ... [and] made Riefenstahl one of the most discussed directors in the history of cinema." But the film - along with Olympia, her record of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 - "also made her an international pariah in the postwar years". Nevertheless, noted the Daily Telegraph, her artistic reputation remained secure, and in 1960 "her peers voted Olympia one of the 10 best films of all time".

Riefenstahl insisted she had never supported the Nazis and made her films for artistic rather than political reasons. Although in 1952 a West German court cleared her of charges of collaborating with the Nazis, accusations of having failed in 1939 to intervene in a massacre of Polish civilians remained. "The incident became like a scarlet letter on her reputation, cited over and over in media inquests on her career," said Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung said Riefenstahl could certainly be accused of naivety, a trait evident until the end of her life. As a result she "had to live half her life with the accusation that she had helped fascism rise to power ... and put herself at the disposal of Hitler's propaganda".

"Opinions will be divided between those who see her as a young, talented and ambitious woman caught up in the tide of events which she did not fully understand, and those who believe her to be a cold and opportunist propagandist and a Nazi by association," said the Independent.

"At the end of her long life she was still the controversial femme fatale of German films," concluded Claudia Lenssen in Die Tageszeitung. "She was interested in beauty, adventure and films, but she was famous for being the woman you love to hate."